Scandal? The Profumo I knew was a secular saint
The BBC’s portrayal has fatal blind spots – John Profumo was a generous man and a devoted husband
For those who knew Jack and Valerie Profumo, the television series on the scandal that bears his name, and which focuses on the role of Christine Keeler and the “society osteopath” Stephen Ward, has made difficult viewing.
Matters may become yet more painful with the BBC Two documentary, to be shown this evening after the final episode, by the veteran journalist Tom Mangold who, as a young newspaper reporter, befriended Ward, and visited him hours before he committed suicide.
Ward’s friends (of whom there were few once he went on trial, but who seem to have multiplied since) have long argued he had committed no crime (he was accused of pimping) and that his trial was a diversionary tactic to assist the establishment.
Tonight’s documentary also includes a taped remark by Keeler, interviewed for research purposes by the makers of the 1989 film Scandal, in which she likens her first sexual experience with Profumo to being “raped”.
It is a terrible accusation, but her equally grave assertion that Ward was a double agent working for MI6 and passing secrets to the KGB remains unsubstantiated. Just as Ward usually gets the benefit of the doubt on that, so should Profumo on any suggestion he behaved like a rapist. Keeler gave various accounts of her life in the half-century after the Profumo affair, not all identical. By the Eighties, she was adept at – as Alastair Campbell might have put it – “sexing up” some details to maximise her story’s commercial value.
I first met John (“Jack”) Profumo a quarter of a century after his affair with Keeler, at a cocktail party in London in 1986.
It was his wife, Valerie Hobson – in the Forties one of the British film industry’s most brilliant stars – who caught my attention across the crowded room. She had aged serenely and was instantly recognisable, even though she hadn’t made a film since 1954, before I was born.
Our host introduced us; and absurdly, as I was then a full-time political writer, my instinct was to talk to Mrs Profumo about her career in the cinema (she had starred in perhaps the greatest British film ever made, Kind Hearts and Coronets), rather than to Mr Profumo about politics. So, while having cordially shaken my hand, he soon moved on, she c could not have been more charming or indulgent to her young admirer. I plucked up the courage t to ask her whether she would lunch with me one day, and to my joy she said she would be delighted. It was the b beginning of a prized friendship that lasted until her death, 12 years later. Val loved The Ritz, and I took her there two or three times a year. She was a highly intelligent and supremely talented woman of immense refinement and with a magnificent sense of humour. On about our third m meeting, she said to me, with amusement: “Jack gets very jealous that I have this young y man who takes me o out to lunch. Could I bring him h next time?” I said that, of course, I should be delighted, and had only never suggested it myself because it was believed Jack – who never commented on the events of 1963 so long as he lived – had a policy of giving journalists a wide berth.
“But, darling,” Val said, “you’d never be so vulgar as to talk to him about that, would you?” And of course I wouldn’t, and I never did. Over the next few years I came to know Jack quite well, and to become as great an admirer of his as I was of Val.
When the 1989 film was released,
He showed the level of greatness a man can achieve in search of redemption
they simply – in public, at any rate – ignored it. It was in poor taste to make it while they were both still alive, raking up a past they had gone to lengths to put behind them. It was not as if Jack, having been discovered in his lie about Keeler, simply protested it was of no consequence (as a politician in a similar circumstance might today) and showed no repentance nor made any effort at redemption.
His whole life after 1963 was about making amends, and the determination with which he did so showed not just the possibility of redemption, but the level of greatness and heroism a man can achieve in the pursuit of it.
Despite fevered speculation, he never put national security at risk; and compares very favourably with his hypocritical tormentor, Colonel George Wigg, a Labour MP who was later arrested for kerb-crawling.
Having resigned not just as secretary of state for war, but also, on the grounds he had told a lie to the House of Commons, his parliamentary seat, Jack sought another means of public service, volunteering at and raising funds for Toynbee Hall, near Spitalfields in London’s East End.
I spent a day there with him in the mid-Nineties, hearing about the work the institution (which began as a university mission among the local poor) continued to do to alleviate poverty and exclusion.
Jack had been invited to help out there after his fall from grace, and began by washing dishes and dancing with old ladies at afternoon socials.
While he was “Jack” to all the staff and volunteers there, they treated him with the sort of reverence one would normally associate with a spiritual leader – even though, well aware of his faults, he was the least pious man imaginable.
The work he did there led to his being awarded the CBE in 1975 and the offer of a peerage, which he declined.
It may be that the man I didn’t know, a quarter of a century earlier, was the sly, loathsome, oversexed chancer depicted in the BBC dramatisation, whose arrogance required public disgrace to eradicate it.
I doubt it. Jack had enormous personal qualities; as the youngest MP in 1940, he voted against Chamberlain in the Norway debate, bringing Churchill to office. The then chief whip said to him: “I can tell you this, you utterly contemptible little s---. On every morning that you wake up for the rest of your life, you will be ashamed of what you did last night.”
Jack made a point of saying that nothing could have been further from the truth.
He had a brilliant war, fighting in North Africa, landing on D-Day in Normandy, and ending up as an aide to General MacArthur after the Allied defeat of Japan.
He also succeeded Enoch Powell as the youngest brigadier in the Army. The qualities that make such a man are well concealed in the television series.
Emilia Fox makes a better fist of Val, though she was both more elegant and down-to-earth than her portrayal suggests; and whatever they went through in 1963, Jack and Val together, when I knew them, were a happy, normal, intensely companionable couple.
In my mind, I can still see that look of startled grief on Jack’s drawn features as he stood in the windswept porch of St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, on the bitter November day of Val’s funeral in 1998, receiving the condolences of their friends.
He died himself in 2006. For his charity work he is remembered as a secular saint; but he might just as well be remembered, in the end, as a good husband.
The Trial of Christine Keeler finishes tonight at 9pm on BBC One, followed by Keeler, Profumo, Ward and Me at 10pm on BBC Two